"... I'm not actually a violent person but I had to learn to kill with my bare hands to make this movie"

Interview with director David Cronenberg... some good bits...:

Have you ever punched a critic?
I've wanted to. I'm not actually a violent person but I had to learn to kill with my bare hands to make this movie [A History of Violence ]. So I could now kill a critic, any critic, in seconds. It'd be so fast people wouldn't know why he dropped to the ground. And I'm tempted to sometimes.

...Now, some critics would say that people don't change, that a bully in grade four turns into an adult bully, that an asshole in high school is still an asshole at fifty.

I know what you're talking about, but look at my children, for example. They surprised me. They have not turned out the way I thought they would at all. They changed while they were growing up. And if you thought you ever knew anybody, you thought you knew your kids, much more so than even your wife. But I also have the existentialist approach, which is that identity is a created thing. It's a willed and created thing, not just a given.

...I can feel the assembly of my personality as I wake up each day.

But your mother tongue is still going to be English tomorrow morning. Your tastes in food and music and sex are going to be the same. How is that an assembled thing?

I'm choosing to assemble myself the same way. I could choose to assemble myself a different way. I think there are instances when people do that. Don't you ever find yourself saying occasionally, "God, he's really changed"?